Presentation by José María Sánchez-Verdú and Andrés Gomis (SIGMA Project soloist)

Concert: Khôra V (2019)

Conversation between José-María Sánchez-Verdú and Mirella Weingarten (scenographer). The sound in space.

Musical tip: The “Egyptian” saxophone (by SIGMA Project) & Microtonal Accordion (by Iñaki Alberdi)

KHÔRA V (2019) for 2 soprano saxophones, 2 “Egyptian” saxophones and microtonal accordion
Iñaki Alberdi, microtonal accordion
Work commissioned by SIGMA Project with funding from INAEM and the Badajoz Philharmonic Society
World premiere 12/IX/2020, IX Ciclo de Música Actual de Badajoz

The KHÔRA cycle (2012-2019) for saxophone quartet and microtonal accordion, consists of a series of pieces with different musical dramaturgies and spatialization. Space and its perception, along with sound, are the backbone of the whole project. Khôra V is the ninth piece and the one that closes this cycle.

The term khôra originates from Platon (Timaeus) and it is musically rephrased on the basis of a review of the concept made in the 20th century by the French philosopher Jacques Derrida (Khôra).

In musical terms, the project values the development of space and sound at the same level. Space and music unfold in unison, like a cartography, like an abstract architecture articulating our awareness and memory of their form. The listener experiences diverse perceptions of the space regarding the musical element – the overlapping of different spaces, the creation of extreme aural and visual perspectives that place the listener in the limits of sensory awareness of sound and its landscape, the articulation of choreographic shifts and movements of the saxophones as if they were trails of their sound propagation, etc. All of this provides the space with a primitive value and articulates the spaces’ memory and scripture as the themes of the whole project.

“Timaeus designates by the name of khôra (“place,” “location,” region,” “country”) the “thing” that is nothing to which it, nonetheless, seems to “give place”, without ever giving anything – neither the ideal paradigms of things nor the copies that an insistent demiurge inscribes in her. […]” (Derrida, Khôra, based on the translation by Ian McLeod, 1995). The Platonic concept of khôra places us in the field of space and confronts us to the dual world of logos and mythos. Khôra, in that sense, is a kind of “nurse”, or “mother”, and occupies a place that can only be ambiguously defined. Myth and scripture are part of this reflection – “Living memory must be exiled to the written remains of another place […]” (Derrida, Khôra).

The cycle offers a world of abstract scriptures that occupy ambiguous and transitional spaces, like containers of an ungraspable thought, of a universe of reflection and questioning.

The entire KHÔRA cycle is dedicated to SIGMA Project.

+ info: J.M. Sánchez-Verdú